The award-winning Israeli film ‘Cow’ opens country-wide.
Tsivia Barkai Yacov’s Red Cow (aka Para Aduma) is an award-winning film that opens throughout Israel on January 10 and is likely to stir controversy. It tells a powerful and unusual coming-of-age story about Benny, a young woman who lives with her father in an ultranationalist messianic Jewish community in the Silwan neighborhood of east Jerusalem, and who rebels when she falls passionately in love with a woman.
The movie, which won the Haggiag Award for Best Israeli Feature Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival this summer (a prize it shared with The Dive), as well as awards for Best Actress (Avigail Kovari) and Best First Feature, features very erotic scenes of its heroine Benny’s sexual awakening with her lover, Yael (Moran Rosenblatt), a young woman from a tough background who has come to study at the messianic enclave.
The simmering conflicts between the father (Gal Toren) and daughter reach a crisis when he learns of her romance, and he rededicates himself to caring for the calf that he believes is the mythical red heifer that heralds the coming of the Messiah.
Barkai Yacov doesn’t deny that many elements of the film are autobiographical, but insists that she made the film to tell a story and not to make a point – political, religious or otherwise.
